By Reviewed by Peter McCallum
Giasone
Pinchgut Opera
David Hansen as Giasone and Celeste Lazarenko as Medea.Credit: Tamara Dean
City Recital Hall. December 5
The birth of opera celebrated the sensuality of the voice, the buoyant spring of dance rhythms and the subtly inflected expressivity of the new style of sung-speech, recitative. Too much of the last mentioned is tedious, but in this revival of Cavalli's Giasone under the imaginative and energised leadership of conductor Erin Helyard, it provided a supple, nuanced and delicately shaded way of guiding the listener through a plot of baroque complexity and absurdity.
When the music was vigorous, as in the overture, Helyard and the Orchestra of the Antipodes imbued it with the physical joy of dance. When it revelled in languid eroticism, the singers luxuriated in the sound of vowels, quickening small moments with ornamentation like a flashing glance or rush of blood. When, as at the climax, the music need something new to mark out a special dramatic moment within the prevailing style of overdone hyper-expressivity, soprano Miriam Allan and Helyard drew back to still musical intensity, drawing sustained tension from the orchestra through which Allan sang with a focused edge.
Chas Rader-Shieber's direction was telling and economical in gesture and the set, with Katren Wood, cleverly created a proscenium effect and stage doors on this flat concert stage. The production showed 17th century opera is not shapeless and unvaried, as it often seems, it is simply not usually done with this level of flair and care.
The story, in Twitter-feed length, is: Jason seduces Isifile then Medea. Awkward. Takes golden fleece but is hopeless at interpersonal relations. As usual, the girls sort it out. Counter-tenor David Hansen as Giasone (or Jason) sets the tone entering stark naked in a bath, and singing with gloriously rounded colour and richness. His voice was fluid and golden in languorous moments and thrilling at points of resolution.
Celeste Lazarenko as a dramatically statuesque and strong Medea complemented this sound with a bright, full tone of blooming sheen. By contrast Miriam Allan as Isifile emphasised transparent high clarity and focus. Tenor Andrew Goodwin as Egeo, Medea's other half, sang with beguiling smoothness and inner radiance, while Christopher Saunders sang Demo, the stuttering factotum, with penetrating vocal projection and comic flair. David Greco as Oreste had developed mature and focused polish and Alexandra Oomens (good-time girl Alinda) has promising tonal freshness and clarity. As Ercole, Nicholas Dinopoulos had suave breadth and depth to his sound (as attendant to a philander this role is an interesting antecedent to Leporello in Mozart's Don Giovanni). Adrian McEniery crossed-dressed drolly as the aged nurse Lefa.
This is another fresh summer musical breeze from Pinchgut.